Student Research Report: The Life of a Waiter
In Spring 2022, students in Dr. Emily Stark’s Research Methods and Design course completed multiple hands-on data collection projects. They were also assigned a blog paper where they discussed one of the topics they chose to research and explained their findings to a general audience. The goal of this assignment was to give students an opportunity to explore a different form of writing from APA-style research papers. Some of these blog papers will be featured here to showcase the students’ findings. Please feel free to contact Dr. Stark through the contact form on this site for additional information about this course or the assignments used.
By Jacob Hall
There once was a man named Jerry who just graduated high school and was headed off to college. While at college he picked up a waiter job at one of the fanciest restaurants in town. He was new to this type of field but was very excited for this new opportunity. After a couple of months working there he started to realize that he was not making near the same amount of tips as the servers and decided to try and find some tips on how to get a better tip and make some more money. He found an article by Stephen and Zweigenhaft (1986) talking about the benefits of physical touch of being a server to get some better tips. They conducted a research study and would have the servers place their hand onto the customer’s shoulder when asking how the food was. What they found was that if a female server did this they had the best results, but the male servers were also higher then when no contact was made. After about a month of doing this he was seeing some promising results and was starting to make as much as the other servers.
Jerry began to wonder who actually tipped him the best. He broke it down into four groups, which were men over and under the age of thirty and women over and under the age of thirty. He ran this experiment for just one weekend at work and was pretty surprised with the results he found. Jerry saw that all four categories tipped over twenty percent which was great, and found that it was the older men that tipped the best. Jerry was not too surprised to see that all of the results were so close because he understands that it doesn’t matter how old someone is, or what gender they are. Everyone has the opportunity to leave a very generous tip and no tip at all. Just when life was going so well for Jerry something took a turn for the worst.
Jerry and his roommate Tom got into a huge fight over a woman and one thing led to another and Tom got released from the lease and Jerry was left alone to pay for the entire apartment. And there was no way that he could afford it with how much he was making currently at his job. So Jerry had to make a decision, which was to find another job or find a way to make more tips at his current job. He decided to stick with his job and make some more tips. After a few months of trying to be even more friendly and smile more it was helping but was still not enough. He took to the wonderful internet to see what he could do. He found a very interesting article by Ciotti (2022) talking about how just offering some ice cold mints to leave the customers with minty fresh breath when giving the check can make a huge difference for receiving a much larger tip. Jerry was eager to give this a try but he needed to get permission from his boss first. His boss was very skeptical at first but then thought it over for a couple of weeks and decided to make all his servers do it. Not only did Jerry start to make more but all of the servers too, and so many people told the boss that it was such a great idea. And since Jerry brought this brilliant idea to his Boss he gave Jerry a $5 raise. Jerry was thrilled and was rolling in the money with more tips than ever and now an additional $5 an hour. Jerry started to look back and really appreciated all the hard work he put in this year. He wasn’t satisfied so he worked harder to get what he wanted. When life threw him a curveball he just used it as more motivation to become a better person and better worker, and even helped make his work make more money as a company. Probably the best part of it all is now even without his ex roommate Tom, Jerry never has to worry about paying for his apartment again and is living his best life.
References
Stephen, R., & Zweigenhaft, R. L. (1986). The effect on tipping of a waitress touching male and female customers. The Journal of Social Psychology, 126(1), 141-142. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1986.9713586
Scout, H. (2012, April 3). How restaurant servers increased tips by 23 percent (without changing service) - help scout. Help Scout: Shared Inbox, Help Center, & Live Chat Software. Retrieved May 4, 2022, from https://www.helpscout.com/blog/the-psychology-of-personalization-how-waiters-increased-tips-by-23-percent-without-changing-service/